The Thing Is
by Scribbler
Summary: Of airports, elbows and last-minutes chances. Jounouchi and Mai finally get a happy ending. Sort of.


**Disclaimer****: **Breathlessly not mine

**A/N****:** Written for Challenge #011 – _Lost and Found_ over at ygodrabble on LiveJournal.

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_**The Thing Is …**_

© Scribbler, August 2010.

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So the thing is, most people have arms, right? And arms have elbows – unless they've been in some awful industrial accident, but that's beside the point and totally _not_ relevant to what I'm talking about. So, yeah, elbows. You don't even think about them half the time, but the thing about elbows is that alongside letting you pick stuff up, drive cars or drink hot beverages without, y'know, raising your whole arm above your head and aiming at your mouth, they're also good weapons. You can break a guy's nose with your elbow way easier than your fist, and I know about punching people. I used to do it a lot. I ain't proud, but the thing is, I was a thug, and there ain't nothing I can do about that now, so on with the story.

The thing is, where I am now in the story is the part where I discovered elbows aren't great at cutting through a crowded airport terminal, and awful when you _don't_ want to break any noses. Or can't for legal reasons, since I sure _wanted_ to break the faces of people in my way. They heard me say _why_ I needed to push ahead, but they didn't move. Heartless fuckers. What part of "The girl of my dreams is on this flight, I've been chasing her for three years without success and I need to get to her before she gets away again!" didn't yank on their freaking heartstrings?

The thing is, the ones who heard me say that and did react kind of knew the story already, being as they were there when Otogi called to say he'd spotted her at the check-in desk when he got off his flight from Kenya. If I was in this up to my neck, they were in it at least to their armpits. And the thing about elbows in a crowd is, you might be able to plant your carcass and evil-eyeball one person digging them into you, but four? Not a chance.

I freaking love my friends sometimes.

"Go!" Anzu yelled, knocking this massive handbag out of some old harpy's hands and blocking the corridor with all the crap inside. And the thing about old ladies' handbags is they're like pocket dimensions, so there was a _lot_ of crap.

"I'll help you, ma'am," Yuugi said, bending down and 'accidentally' kneeing things left and right so people had to either trip, stop or stomp on stuff, and you don't stomp on an old ladies' things in public. Yuugi looks sweet, but he has this razor-sharp mind, so don't ever think he's useless in a crisis.

Honda ran with me for the last stretch, which is saying a lot, since he thought I was an idiot. He told me so, like, a thousand times over his shoulder during the ride there on his motorcycle. The thing about Honda is, he can be a dick, but he's also my best bud, and he's on my side no matter what. So when we got to the edge of the crowd and he spotted Mai going through the doors, he could have pretended he hadn't. I wouldn't have known. Instead, he yelled her name.

"Go get her," he said, shoving me. "Moron."

And then it was just me, and her, and… my elbows. And the thing about elbows is, you can't see them most of the time, because they're all down by you sides, yeah? But when Mai turned around and we were, y'know, just _standing_ there, staring at each other, I didn't have a freaking clue what to do next. I hadn't planned that far.

"I," she started, all wobbly and weird and un-Mai-like. The thing about Mai is, she's super tough and strong, but I used to make the world think that too, once. Don't be fooled by the tough people. They're usually the frailest of all. "I came to see you. I lost my nerve."

I'm not a thug anymore. And Mai isn't the one who got away, either. Because the thing about elbows is, you actually see them best when you hug someone and don't let go, even when the freaking crowd finally gets romantic and starts whooping around you.

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_**Fin.**_

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